Government 4000/6816 Professor Patchen Markell Cornell University Office hours: Tuesdays, 2–4pm Fall 2021 or by appointment, White Hall 311 [email protected] SEMINAR: ARENDT Mondays, 11:20am–1:50pm, location TBA COURSE DESCRIPTION: This is a seminar on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, meant for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in Government and related fields in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Prior familiarity with Arendt’s work is not necessary, but some prior work in political theory is required (e.g., Government 1615, for undergraduates). One source of Arendt’s enduring interest as a political theorist lies in the fact that she seemed to understand the meaning of “politics” very differently from many of her contemporaries and predecessors. But if politics is not essentially about the distinction between friends and enemies; or the possession of the legitimate means of violence in a territory; or who gets what, when, and how; or who does what to whom; or the rule of reason in the city and the soul—then what was politics, from Arendt’s perspective? Why did it matter? Was there such a thing as doing politics well or badly? What were the prospects for politics as a distinctive human practice in the post-World War II world? In this seminar we will pursue these and other questions via a slow, chapter-by-chapter reading and discussion of Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition, along with a number of other, shorter works of Arendt’s from from the 1940s through the 1970s. These readings will be supplemented by selections from the works of philosophers with whom Arendt was tacitly or explicitly engaged; selections from the writings of some of Arendt’s contemporaries, which will help us situate her work in the political and intellectual landscapes of the postwar world; and a few more recent readings that will give us different angles on some of the subjects Arendt addressed. This year, the supplementary readings have been chosen to foreground the triangular relationship among politics, philosophy, and aesthetics (taking that last term broadly and in light of its roots in the Greek word for sense-perception, aisthēsis); but our discussions need not be confined to those themes. TEXTS: The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958) has been ordered at the Cornell Store. You may use any Chicago edition of The Human Condition. Other readings will be available via the “Files” tab of this course’s Canvas site and via the live links on this syllabus (links to Canvas will require authentication; for links to journal websites or JSTOR use Cornell’s Cornell’s Passkey.) SEMINAR FORMAT AND PROCEDURES: The course will meet in person. All participants are expected to follow current Cornell COVID-19 guidance while in the classroom. At the beginning of each session, I will ask each student to identify one passage in the week’s reading that they found interesting but puzzling and would like to discuss further, and to explain, briefly, why the passage seemed important to them, and what was puzzling about it. Either at the beginning of our discussion or when we return from our mid-session break, I will usually also make some opening remarks to help frame our discussion, usually for around 20–30 minutes. 1 ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADES: There are really only two graded requirements for this class: (1) keep up with the reading, attend class, and participate constructively in the seminar discussions (20% of your grade); (2) write a seminar paper of 20–25 pages on a topic you design in consultation with me, due at a date TBD (set by the registrar) during finals period (80% of your grade). However, I recognize that some students might not have written a paper of this length before, or might like more structure to their semester, or might like to receive feedback on their writing before the end of the term. Therefore, each student may also opt to submit up to three short response papers (1000–1250 words) over the course of the semester. These response papers should do on a smaller scale what a seminar paper does at a larger scale: identify a significant question about the readings whose answer is not obvious, and then try to work out an answer to the question, however provisional, and make it as persuasive as possible. When you submit a response paper, you must tell me whether you are submitting it for feedback only, or also for a grade. Each graded response paper will be worth 10% of your final grade and will correspondingly reduce the proportion of your final grade determined by your long seminar paper by 10%. You don’t need to decide in advance whether you’re going to submit zero, one, two, or three response papers: you can figure out what you want to do as the semester proceeds. But you may not submit more than one response paper in the same week, and I won’t accept them later than December 6 (which is the last session of our seminar). Please start thinking about your final paper topic no later than the first half of November, and consult with me about the topic before Thanksgiving break. The paper need not draw on research beyond the syllabus, although it may, and I’m happy to recommend further reading in areas that interest you. The paper also need not focus on the issues we have been discussing in class: you are welcome to take the paper in other directions as long as it retains some non-superficial connection to Arendt’s political thought. COURSE POLICIES: Seminar norms. A seminar is a collective effort at understanding something challenging that none of us, myself included, already fully grasps, no matter how much we may already know. To that end, I ask participants in the seminar to try to keep the discussion focused on our shared object of investigation— i.e., the readings on the syllabus—rather than on ourselves; to welcome rather than scorn uncertainty and puzzlement, in ourselves and in each other; and to treat disagreements and differences in perspective among the members of the seminar as resources for, not obstacles to, understanding. Electronic devices. You’re welcome to use a laptop or tablet to access course materials or to take notes during class sessions, but you may not use these devices for any other purpose, including “research,” during class. Cell phones should be silenced—fully silenced, not put on “vibrate”—and kept in a bag or pocket while in seminar. WEEKLY READING ASSIGNMENTS: Week 1 (August 30): Introduction; no reading Week 2 (September 6): Labor Day; no class Please start early on the reading for next week, since there’s a lot. 2 Week 3 (September 13): In the shadow of totalitarianism 1. Arendt, “‘The Rights of Man’: What Are They?,” Modern Review (1949) 2. Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” Partisan Review (1948) 3. Eric Voegelin, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”; Arendt, “A Reply,” Review of Politics (1953) 4. Michael Rothberg, “At the Limits of Eurocentrism,” in Multidirectional Memory 5. Ayten Gündoğdu, “Borders of Personhood,” in Rightlessness in an Age of Rights Week 4 (September 20): The break in tradition and the loss of authority 1. Arendt, “Religion and Politics” (plus editorial notes) in The Modern Challenge to Tradition 2. Arendt, “What Is Authority?” in Between Past and Future Week 5 (September 27): Arendt and Plato 1. Plato, Republic, trans. Bloom, 472a–541b, 595a–608b 2. Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” in Social Research (2004) Week 6 (October 4): Arendt and Heidegger (and Plato) 1. Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” in Pathmarks 2. Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,” in Essays in Understanding Week 7 (October 11): Fall Break; no class Week 8 (October 18): “Prologue” and “The Human Condition” 1. Arendt, The Human Condition, 1–21 2. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought 3. Daniel Lang, “Earth Satellite,” in Hiroshima to the Moon 4. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, selections 5. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, chap. 5 Week 9 (October 25): “The Public and the Private Realm” 1. Arendt, The Human Condition, 22–78 2. Iris Marion Young, “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme,” in On Female Body Experience 3. Patricia Owens, “Out of the Confines of the Household,” in Economy of Force 4. Deborah Nelson, “Reinventing Privacy,” in Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America Week 10 (November 1): “Labor” 1. Arendt, The Human Condition, 79–135 2. Ellen Meiksins Wood, “The Myth of the Idle Mob,” in Peasant-Citizen and Slave 3. Moishe Postone, “Rethinking Marx (in a Post-Marxist World),” in Reclaiming the Sociological Classics 4. Sara-Maria Sorentino, “Natural Slavery, Real Abstraction, and the Virtuality of Anti- Blackness,” in Theory & Event (2019) 3 Week 11 (November 8): “Work” 1. Arendt, The Human Condition, 136–174 2. Tim Ingold, “On Weaving a Basket,” in The Perception of the Environment 3. Sara Ahmed, “Using Things,” in What’s the Use? Week 12 (November 15): “Action” 1. Arendt, The Human Condition, 175–247 2. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, selections 3. Werner Jaeger, “Thucydides: Political Philosopher,” in Paideia, vol. 1. Week 13 (November 22): “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age” 1. Arendt, The Human Condition, 248–325 2. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays 3. Cathryn Carson, “Science as Instrumental Reason: Heidegger, Habermas, Heisenberg,” in Continental Philosophy Review 4. Arthur Miller, “Imagery and Representation in Twentieth-Century Physics,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol.